Your Right to Know

As far back as 1953, when television shows came in two colors — black and white — WHIZ-TV in
Zanesville was serving viewers in its swath of rural Ohio.

But never in its 59-year history has the NBC affiliate enjoyed a bonanza like it is reaping from
the 2012 election campaign, received in one primary color — green.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Doug Pickrell, WHIZ’s general sales manager for 21
years. “Not only the sheer amount of dollars that are being spent, but also in terms of how early
it began this year.”

By dint of serving as ground zero in the presidential race, Ohio’s TV stations are having a
banner year, as is evident every time you turn on the local news. And what comes across in
unremitting 30-second bursts is a preponderance of acidic ads that cause even the most seasoned
political observers to recoil.

“You feel like when you turn on TV you’re in a bomb shelter,” said Mary Anne Sharkey, a
communication consultant in Cleveland who has worked for both Democrats and Republicans.

Ohio stations raked in a nation-leading total of more than $44 million just from May 1 to July
14 on ads to influence the presidential race between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney,
according to Kegan Beran, president of Strategic Media Placement, a subsidiary of the Strategy
Group for Media, which is a national political advertising firm headquartered north of
Columbus.

During the 75-day period, TV stations in Cleveland shared $20 million and those in Columbus
split more than $8 million.

According to an analysis by Wells Fargo Securities, Cleveland, the nation’s 18th--largest TV
market, is second nationally for spending on political ads. Columbus, the 34 {+t}{+h} largest, is 8
{+t}{+h}. The same study showed that Zanesville, the 203 {+r}{+d} largest market, was No. 1 in
political dollars as a percent of market revenue from June 4-24.

“Our business in July is double what it typically is,” Pickrell said.

Examining what she labeled a “hot market,” Elizabeth Wilner of Kantar Media, a national firm
that tracks ad spending, found that by early this month 1,640 political spots had been aired in
Columbus, double the number that ran here over the same period in the 2008 presidential race.

And here’s the bad news if all those ads already are turning your brain to mush: The really
heavy political ad season traditionally doesn’t start until Labor Day.

“The early spending is unprecedented,” said Rex Elsass, president of the Strategy Group. “This
demonstrates how competitive Ohio is.”

Along with cash pouring in for the presidential race, $36 million worth of Ohio TV ad time
already has been booked to influence the outcome of the U.S. Senate race between incumbent Democrat
Sherrod Brown and Republican Josh Mandel.

“I’ve never seen a time when congressional candidates go up on the air in May for a fall
election,” WHIZ’s Pickrell said.

As much or more than the candidates, the TV ad orgy is fueled by so-called super-PAC’s,
third-party groups unrestricted by the spending and fund-raising limits imposed on candidates by
the Federal Election Commission.

Those groups sprung up to be mighty players in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling
in the Citizens United case. The justices concluded that corporations and unions could make
unlimited donations to independent organizations, which then could spend as much as they wanted on
advertising.

For example, Crossroads GPS, a Brown-trashing independent organization co-founded by former
White House adviser Karl Rove, has $6.5 million in Ohio TV ad time reserved, which is more than the
roughly $4.5 million reserved each by the Mandel and Brown campaigns.

In her look at Columbus, Wilner wrote, “As of July 12, every presidential ad on the air in the
Columbus market was a negative ad.”

But then, that’s obvious to viewers not just here, but in Cleveland and elsewhere across
Ohio.

“Thank goodness you can change the channels,” Sharkey said. “What would we do without remote
control?”

She said that “without question, it’s the most negative I have ever seen,” referring to the
presidential race. “Usually you have the warm and fuzzy bio ads running up to the conventions —
family and patriotic music and canoeing and doing things out in nature.” Then after the
conventions, “it’s bombs away.”

“I know that the pollsters and ad agencies say negative ads work,” Sharkey said. “But I think at
this point they are not effective because people are sick of them.”

Others are not convinced that the relentless crush of negative commercials will continue, at
least in the short term. William J. Green, a communication analyst in Pittsburgh, said, “All this
goes away. We go into Olympics mode next week, and that will be all-consuming.”

Jack Pitney, a professor of political science at Claremont College in California, said the
negative tone is partly because an incumbent president is seeking re-election and must defend his
record on the economy.

“If neither Romney nor Obama were an incumbent, you might see more positive spots,” Pitney
said.

Both Green and Pitney said negative commercials and harsh attacks have been part of American
politics since the dawn of the republic. Pitney pointed to the 1950 Senate race in California
between Richard M. Nixon and Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas at the height of the “red scare.”
Nixon, trying to portray Douglas as an out-of-touch liberal, said she was “pink right down to her
underwear,” while Douglas denounced Nixon’s campaign as “one of young men in dark shirts” — a
none-too-subtle reference to the Nazis.

This campaign’s TV commercials have mirrored the harsh rhetoric and charges of lying that have
been flung about by both presidential campaigns. Many of the angry charges revolve around Romney’s
role in Bain Capital, a financial equity firm he owned and directed but says he left in 1999 to run
the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. Securities and Exchange Commission documents,
however, show that Romney owned all of the company stock until 2002. The timing of Romney’s
departure is important because the Obama campaign has accused Bain of investing in companies that
sent jobs abroad.

That prompted Stephanie Cutter, the Obama deputy campaign manager, to assert that Romney may
have misrepresented his Bain status with the SEC, “which is a felony.” Romney demanded an
apology.

Then former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, a Romney surrogate, said he wished Obama “would
learn to be an American” — an apparent allusion to the long-discredited claim that Obama was not
born in the United States. Sununu then went on CNN to say he “made a mistake.”

And in Columbus last week, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal called Obama the “most incompetent
president that’s been there in a long time.”A couple of days earlier, the Romney campaign referred
to “payoffs” made to Obama contributors and accused Obama of a “dishonest” campaign on tax
policy.

Sharkey said the increasingly personal attacks are a new feature of presidential politics: “
There used to be a little bit of a gentleman’s agreement where you would at least leave the other
side standing after the campaign, because one of them had to govern. But that’s not true anymore.”&
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